In this biography, author Michael explores the twin questions of who was truly America’s first president and why has he been forgotten?
Born in 1715, the aristocratic John Hanson grew up on a tobacco plantation located (ironically) near the Mount Vernon estate now revered as George Washington’s residence. Michael readily acknowledges that he is a Hanson family descendant but avoids hagiography, frequently scolding Hanson (and other Founding Fathers) for owning slaves. In 1781, the Continental Congress unanimously elected Hanson president of America’s first government—eight years before Washington took the helm of the country’s first constitutional government. Previously, Hanson was the first state legislator to argue for independence, and the first to enlist militias for the Revolutionary War—which he helped finance. During his one-year presidency, Hanson decreed July 4th as Independence Day and the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving. He also launched the Postal Service, the census and the custom of presidential portraiture. And yet, not only is Hanson unknown to most Americans, his probable grave site has been paved over. Michael believes that Hanson is overlooked, in part, because the nation’s first government was designed to be weak, and because many of Hanson’s diaries and personal effects have been lost. But he also builds a persuasive argument that 20th-century historians deserve a share of the blame, singling out (but not naming) presidential historians as “the handmaidens of American amnesia.” He also calls out and identifies websites, particularly Wikipedia, which routinely post gross inaccuracies about Hanson. Stylistically similar to a monograph, Michael’s narrative presents, and all too-often repeats, a torrent of information in fine detail. But this is the first comprehensive biography of “the most forgotten major figure in American history,” and reading this volume is nothing if not enriching. An unrefined but rich trove of information about a major historical figure who has largely been forgotten.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1467958066
Page Count: 452
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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